Month: May 2022

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 7000 chips are due out in the next few months. (credit: AMD)

AMD first teased its upcoming Ryzen 7000-series CPUs and its new Zen 4 CPU architecture at CES in January. The company said that the chips would use the new AM5 CPU socket, that they would be built on a 5 nm manufacturing process from TSMC, and that they would be available this fall.

None of those facts has changed, and AMD still hasn’t announced pricing or more specific availability info for the new chips. But at its Computex keynote this week, AMD revealed a few additional details about the Ryzen 7000 processors and the motherboards and chipsets that will support them when they’re all released to the public in the next few months.

Zen 4’s foundation: Socket AM5

Before covering any specific features of Zen 4, Ryzen 7000, or AMD’s 600-series chipsets, we should cover some basic facts about the upcoming AM5 CPU socket.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Florida law that makes it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians likely violates the First Amendment, according to a unanimous ruling by a panel of three federal appeals court judges.

The ruling, released today by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, upheld key portions of a preliminary injunction issued by a US District Court judge in June 2021. Florida appealed that injunction. As a result of today’s ruling, the state still cannot enforce the law’s content-moderation requirements.

“It is substantially likely that [the Florida law’s] content-moderation restrictions and its requirement that platforms provide a thorough rationale for every content-moderation action violate the First Amendment,” the appeals court judges found in today’s ruling. It wasn’t a complete loss for Florida, as the judges said it is “unlikely that the law’s remaining (and far less burdensome) disclosure provisions violate the First Amendment.” Florida can thus enforce those less burdensome disclosure requirements while litigation is pending.

Enlarge / Let’s see, you landed on my “Google Ads” space, and with three houses… that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Google Play’s in-app billing crackdown sure is causing a lot of conflicts with Android’s biggest app developers. Google recently decided to enforce a long-standing Play Store rule that says Google Play must be the one-and-only in-app purchase provider for apps downloaded from the Play Store, locking out developers from using their own payment solutions.

The latest huge developer that is unhappy with Google’s new policy is Match Group, the owner of Tinder and several other dating apps. Match sued Google on May 9 for “strategic manipulation of markets, broken promises, and abuse of power in requiring Match Group to use Google’s billing system to remain in the Google Play Store.” On Friday, the two companies reached an agreement to not restrict Match Group’s Play Store access until the lawsuit concludes.

The two companies put out dueling press releases, describing the situation very differently. Match’s blog post is titled “Google Concedes Key Issues on Google Play Policies,” while Google has a more stern title: “The facts about the temporary Match Group agreement.”

Enlarge (credit: Rob Engelaar | Getty Images)

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

On February 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, a prolific ransomware gang called Conti made a proclamation on its dark website. It was an unusually political statement for a cybercrime organization: Conti pledged its “full support of Russian government” and said it would use “all possible resources to strike back at the critical infrastructures” of Russia’s opponents.

Perhaps sensing that such a public alliance with the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin could cause problems, Conti tempered its declaration later that day. “We do not ally with any government and we condemn the ongoing war,” it wrote in a follow-up statement that nonetheless vowed retaliation against the United States if it used cyberwarfare to target “any Russian-speaking region of the world.”

Enlarge (credit: Chuchart Duangdaw)

Spring has brought remarkably extreme heat to India and Pakistan this year. Unusually extensive heatwaves have followed one after another since March and are continuing well into May. The situation presents a conundrum for rapid studies of the role of climate change in this event, as we can’t yet put an end date on it. Nevertheless, a pair of studies have looked into the influence of the climate on March and April’s heat.

Daily and monthly temperature records have been broken in many areas. Thermometers have hit temperatures as high as 120°F (49°C), and the heat has been accompanied by abnormally dry weather. Record-breaking heatwaves often coincide with drought, as the dry ground heats up even more without the cooling effect of evaporation. However, the lower humidity has reduced the heat’s threat to human health, though at least 90 deaths have been reported so far, and that number is expected to rise.

Working outdoors has been extremely challenging, and the impacts of the slowdown have added up as the heat drags on. The effect on agriculture has been significant, with wheat yield losses already estimated at 10–35 percent in areas of northern India, for example. With Ukrainian exports down because of war, India had previously been planning to increase its own exports but instead instituted an export ban this month.